Lucas Alamán

Who was Lucas Alamán?

Lucas Ignacio Alamán y Escalada was a Mexican scientist, politician, historian and writer. He studied at the Real Colegio de Minas de la Nueva España. He frequently traveled on his credentials as a scientist and diplomat, becoming one of the most educated men in Mexico. At the outset of the war for Mexican independence, in September 1810, Alamán is said to have been an eyewitness of the massacre of Spanish families in his home city of Guanajuato. This experience may have influenced his lifelong devotion to conservative politics and his nostalgia for monarchic rule for Mexico.

In 1821, before the consummation of Mexico's independence, Alamán was a deputy to the Cádiz Cortes for the province of Nueva Galicia, New Spain. Later in the same year Mexico won its independence from Spain. Alamán returned to Mexico and became one of the most influential politicians in the nascent country. He was a co-founder and lifelong member of the Mexican Conservative Party, and he consistently defended the centralist organization of Mexico. It is said that he was one of those behind the murder of independence hero Vicente Guerrero. Under the junta that governed Mexico after the fall of Iturbide, Alamán served from 1823 to 1825 in the powerful post of Minister of Interior and Exterior Relations. He was a member of the junta that briefly governed Mexico in 1829 after the Plan de Jalapa with the aim of installing Anastasio Bustamante as president.